In a vain hope of becoming a polymath, I have developed an interest in writing poetry. I find it interesting that I can work in a field so riddled with jargon, yet be so easily put off other subjects, like poetry, because of the jargon. As I have tried to explain on numerous occasions, most of the concepts at the heart of mobile technology are actually quite simple, but the lingo creates a confusing fog around them. It’s the same for software, except that the lingo changes often. I once tried to figure out how many words there are for program, like applet and EJB, and don’t think I managed to exhaust the list.

Poetry, or rather the mechanics of poetry, also has its jargon. My basic understanding of Greek roots prepared me for “meter” and even “pentameter”, but I wasn’t quite ready for “iambic” and then “iambic pentameter”. To spare you the gory details, it means a line of poetry with the following rhythm: da dum, da dum, da dum, da dum, da dum. For example:

He hit the tit to make the phone go brrrrr!

I so hope that example is correct. Stay with me, I’m a complete novice! For further poetry instruction, I suggest Stephen Fry’s wonderful book “An Ode Less Travelled” (review).

In my increasingly futile and vainglorious attempts to mobilize all human activity, I thought that poetry might be a good target. Of course, it is nothing new. I would often begin “master classes” with a poem taken from the texting poetry competition held by The Guardian, an English newspaper. It goes like this:

The winning poem
txtin iz messin,
mi headn’me englis,
try2rite essays,
they all come out txtis.
gran not plsed w/letters shes getn,
swears i wrote better
b4 comin2uni.
&she’s african
By Hetty Hughes

The challenge of fitting a poem into a text message is interesting, but inevitably the poem will be limited. I guess that the next step would be “MMS poetry”, giving a much larger blank sheet with which to work.

I think an more interesting idea is collaborative poetry. I once posted the idea of “rap battling” via mobiles, based on a gaming concept I had developed for an “urban culture” company. I think the same idea could be used to bounce a poem back and forth, allowing the participants to add their lines of iambic pentameter, or some other meter. The same idea could be used to teach the basics of poetry. As per the rap battling idea, the poems could be rated by other participants in the “mobile poetry community” and used to send out the collaborative poem of the day.